WPeddit post ranking algorithms

The WPeddit for WordPress brings the awesome algorithms for ranking posts used in the reddit website to your very own WordPress website. The details of the algorithms are from a very useful website here

Effects of submission time

Following things can be said about submission time related to story ranking:

Submission time has a big impact on the ranking and the algorithm will rank newer stories higher than older

The score won’t decrease as time goes by, but newer stories will get a higher score than older. This is a different approach than the Hacker News’s algorithm which decreases the score as time goes by

Here is a visualization of the score for a story that has same amount of up and downvotes, but different submission time:

The logarithm scale

The hot ranking uses the logarithm function to weight the first votes higher than the rest. Generally this applies:

The first 10 upvotes have the same weight as the next 100 upvotes which have the same weight as the next 1000 etc…

Here is a visualisation:

Without using the logarithm scale the score would look like this:

Effects of downvotes

Reddit is one of the few sites that has downvotes. As you can read in the code a story’s “score” is defined to be:

up_votes – down_votes

The meaning of this can be visualised like this:

This has a big impact for stories that get a lot of upvotes and downvotes (e.g. controversial stories) as they will get a lower ranking than stories that just get upvotes. This could explain why kittens (and other non-controversial stories) rank so high 🙂

Conclusion of the algorithms

Submission time is a very important parameter, generally newer stories will rank higher than older

The first 10 upvotes count as high as the next 100. E.g. a story that has 10 upvotes and a story that has 50 upvotes will have a similar ranking

Controversial stories that get similar amounts of upvotes and downvotes will get a low ranking compared to stories that mainly get upvotes

WPeddit WordPress Plugin

The widgets below are brought to you by this plugin. It gives your visitors a snapsnot of the top ranked posts on your site as well as the hottest comments. Promoting top quality content to them that your visitors love

This is a test comment to show how the rating works. It only adds ratings to the parent of the… on WPeddit main features

Hottest Posts

Want the full theme?

WPeddit is the complete solution to your website needs. It is more than just a theme. It is a fully responsive template with epic functionality. This turns your website and theme into a very powerful, user engaged website.

Adds vote up or vote down buttons to your website posts

Lets users navigate around your website easily by category

See which posts are your visitors favourites

Show your hottest posts first to any new visitor

Keep track of which posts perform well

Easily allow users to generate their own categories and content

Why do I want this solution?

In todays internet age, the amount of time someone spends on your website on a first visit is getting shorter and shorter. What this product does is display your hottest posts to them as soon as they land on your site.

This keeps them there longer, they can also influence which posts are high up in the rankings, or vote down ones they don’t like. It really is awesome.

That’s true. It works just like reddit. You can allow members to create their own categories and post updates to that category. It completely increases user engagement and that’s not all.

OH NO.. not a reddit clone

It’s not. It’s much more than that. The default skin is designed to display similar to reddit so that people can instantly recognise the purpose and use of this theme and templates. But we know that we don’t just want a bunch of reddit clones out there.. with no variety and no individuality.. well, the WPeddit template and plugin are developed and built on the Twitter Bootstrap.. this means ultimate flexibility for you and your website.

What this means is, the website is primed to be switched to any bootstrap skin you like. All it needs is a bit of attention and a small amount of knowledge.

But I don’t have this knowledge

Don’t worry. This product comes with 3 starter themes for you to get your teeth into. If you do not like the default layout you can start off with any of the following starter skins.

What our users are saying

The template and theme have been tested by a number of beta testers and here is what they are saying!

This is THE WordPress theme of 2013 and maybe EVER. I love it! Thank you!

Wow I love it! Get it up on Themeforest ASAP!!

Dude.. you turned WordPress into a powerful reddit like solution… very cool, very cool

v1.0 of WPeddit is still in its infancy, more and more skins will be added given the right level of demand and support for this product. So please do buy now and help support this project! If you are a bootstrap skin developer and would like to help have your skin integrated then please do contact me for more information.

Feature list

Fully responsive looks great on iPhone, iPad and other devices

Built on Twitter Bootstrap

Full use of Twitter Bootstrap scaffolding and components

Front end posting ability

Vote security – IP vote locking or member vote locking

Front end post security – Publish posts immediately or have them pending review